I have been lazy and busy for the last few month – wasting perhaps valuable and pithy thoughts on FB. But today my heart is broken and I am in mourning for a little boy I do not know. His name is Leiby Kletzky and he would have been 9 years old next week. Now he is dead. Like most of this country I paid some attention to the trial of Casey Anthony – an ordeal almost 6 years old and one that resulted in an acquittal based on lack of a case. The DA in Orlando screwed up. Whatever we learn now about this matter will always be fraught with doubts but Casey Anthony is protected by double jeopardy so she may be a pariah – but she will go on her way. I don’t much care to be very honest.

Today I got an email from a list I am on called Hatzolah – a volunteer Jewish ER service and this one caught my eye. It told of a little boy walking home from day camp in borough Park Brooklyn who was kidnapped, murdered and dismembered by a member of the same neighborhood. This happened yesterday – not three years ago. Leiby was a little Orthodox Jewish lad with glasses, a yarmulke and sidelocks and sneakers coming back from day camp. A little boy. The family’s only son. His mother was on her way to meet him but he got lost and a man with a similar look drove by and we imagine Leiby asked for directions. Leiby got into the car. We will never know what he said but tonight he will be mourned and buried.

The man presumed innocent until proven guilty Levi Aron is a quiet, religious loner who lived in his parent’s home. He was not married and he worked full time. He only known crime was pishing in public. I suspect most men have done this. One can only assume that there were very dark parts in his head and where his soul might have once been. He has supposedly admitted to what he did to Leiby. What he did was so heinous and ugly you can read the tabloids to get the details. A parent should never know such things can happen to children. Such things should never happen.

While I write this I am waiting for the real press to tell us about Leiby and his short but beloved life. The sisters who must have adored him, the mother who treasured him; the father who planned in his heart for the 13th birthday on which he would become a man. I am waiting for the outrage and the anger and the fury that accompanied the death of Caylee Anthony. A child no more or less precious than this little boy. I am waiting for the outcry, the keeners, the wailers, the sign carriers who will demonstrate for Leiby and I know I will be even sadder because none of that will happen. And I would ask you who have loved any child to make sure it does. Because it matters just as much.

The world is a very, very dangerous place… as I raise my daughter I just don’t know how to approach the discussion…. should kids be made to be afraid? I don’t think that is the answer but they are so vulnerable and this country is getting to be a scarier place to live by the day.